Electronic Book Review - talan memmotthttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/talan-memmott
enMoving Through Me as I Movehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/stenorthographic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Stephanie Strickland</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-05</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Vannevar Bush wanted his Memex to intercept and capture the neural circuits of the stenographer who could reduce his words to a phonetic code on the fly, whose encoding practice was encompassed by her body. As an electronic poet, I want to do the same thing, not from the position of Bush, outside the device, but from the position of the stenographer, attached to it. In her body, words moved through her as she moved, a fluent circuit of meaning that she hosted, instigated, permitted, understood, explored, and enjoyed.</p>
<p>Bush exhibited some justified fear as to whether her practice would be complete and accurate according to his standards:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">A girl strokes [the stenotype’s] keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is <span class="lightEmphasis">supposed</span> to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. (Bush 1994, section 3, paragraph 3 [emphasis added])</p>
<p>He also wanted to capture the neural knowledge she attained by intervening in the production of the text:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand? (Bush 1994, section 8, paragraph 6)</p>
<p>Hers is a somatic practice that deflects not only the threat of analytic dispersal, into “simplified language… nascent form… intelligible only to the initiated,” as Bush characterizes her code, but also the threat of obsessive recombination and confusion, the multiple overlapping streams of speech she is asked to transcribe.</p>
<p>The notion of “moving through me as I move,” as a paradigm for interaction, intends to install the stenographer, and not her employer, as the crucial creative/receptive presence in digital art. Hers is an egalitarian position that can be stated of, and by, each element in a dynamic network. “Move through me as I move” is as much the “voice” of a hypertext as it is of the writer/encoder. It is also the voice of the network addressing all those hosting it and served by it. In the case of work open to multiple authoring, or to synchronous reading and performance, the command “move through me as I move” represents the utterance of each of the performers and participants speaking to all the others. In this mutual command there is an implicit promise of fluent mutual adjustment to whatever comes.</p>
<p>The stenographer, however, is more than a writer/reader/monitor; she is also the operator of an appliance. This position is described by Talan Memmott (2001), here explicating his theory/fiction hybrid, <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, winner of the 2000 trAce/altx New Media Writing competition:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">With a document that is acted upon, unfolded, revealed, opened rather than read, full of holes to elsewhere, hiding secret inScriptions, filled with links like mines and traps and triggers – we are no longer talking page or screen, but appliance. Navigating the Lexia of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is kind of like getting a new device and trying to figure out how the heck it works… (Memmott 2001)</p>
<p>The stenographer moves within an unforeseeable context. Communicating by “strokes” in an energized yet languid atmosphere, she is absorbed, alert, and somehow also free to gaze about the room – the aspect that most disquieted Bush. She participates in a form of dancing in which the lead changes many times a minute, her moments of apprehending/encoding activity giving way to deep moments of passive reception in a regular alternation or oscillation.</p>
<p>An oscillating, or flickering, pattern has often been invoked with regard to electronic art. Katherine Hayles has said, “We have only begun to construct a semiotics that takes into account the different functions signifiers perform when they cease to be flat marks and become instead layers of code correlated through correspondence rules” (Hayles 2000). In recognition of the layered dynamic interactions between text and code, she proposed the term “flickering signifiers” for text onscreen. Both Richard Lanham (1993) in <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word</span> and Bolter and Grusin (1999) in <span class="booktitle">Remediation</span> have remarked the importance of an oscillation between the viewer positions of “looking at” and “looking through”; that is, between experiencing works primarily as heavily mediated and “windowed,” in the software sense, or primarily immediate and immersive, as in looking through transparent glass. I would like to propose a third kind of flickering or oscillation, the oscillation that occurs between the processing of alphabetic text and the processing of image in works that use both. A digital writer who uses image and text is in fact writing a score for their shifting interrelation.</p>
<p>Flickering or oscillating poems differ from pure sound and pure image work in the following respect: whereas sound layered on sound creates new sound, and image on image makes a new image, alphabetic text, superimposed on alphabetic text or on image, does not reliably yield legible text. In the poems that explore this truth, one flickers between seeing the viewable and reading the legible. Jim Rosenberg (1996) and (Mary-Anne Breeze 2000) are poets who approach this movement very differently.</p>
<p>Rosenberg (figure 15.1) works with the words and phrases of a standard vocabulary but overlays them in a dense blur of self-interfering micro-information. A presenting image of tangle is literally drawn apart by hand into legible text, but no sooner do words come into focus than the slightest mouse movement dissolves them back into blur. These texts thus move through the reader, as she moves, at exactly the pace her hand/brain browses – and superimposed on that oscillation, one experiences a constant trembling across the view/read cusp.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/rosen15-1.jpg" width="400" height="273" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.1: Jim Rosenberg, The Barrier Frames (Eastgate Systems)</span></span></p>
<p>Mez, on the other hand, in a practice she calls “M[ez]ang.elle.ing,” leads us to confront the legible with strategies ordinarily reserved for the viewable. A good characterization of her work comes from a source that, on the face of it, has nothing to do with poetry. Michael Cohen’s (1992) ” <span class="booktitle">Blush</span> and <span class="booktitle">Zebrackets</span>: Two Schemes for Typographic Representation of Nested Associativity” describes two tools that treat words and documents as pictures, in order to create denser data without loss of legibility. Cohen has understood that one can intensify both the density of picture data and the legibility of read data at the same time. He says of these tools:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Creative orthography frees words from traditional… constraints, allowing textual re-presentation of multidimensional concepts by projecting multilayered structure into linear text. Extended electronic typography… provides additional parsing cues… (Cohen 1992, 449)</p>
<p>If we add the idea of both packing and unpacking compound symbols, we have an excellent description of Mez’s practice, excerpted sentences of which, from her e-mail writing, appear in figure 15.2:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Re][stuttered][[sutured][: not][net][.art<br />
Date:<br />
Wed, 21 Feb 2001 10:56:26 +1100</p>
<p class="longQuotation">][the x.press][ed 4 time,<br />
4 the answer,<br />
4 the dreamic caul 2 a][r][mories][][</p>
<p class="longQuotation">][jumper lead.ing 2 a p][asse][o][mo][lished cliff-curve][</p>
<p class="longQuotation">.drain the cu][s]p n datadrown.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">……………………………………+<br />
…………..+[not.art is][net][a rutting corpse-knot]+<br />
……………………………………+</p>
<p class="longQuotation">+please stop+</p>
<p class="longQuotation">+++ please l][ectro][][gl][isten +++</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Figure 15.2: Excerpts from Mez’s email writing</span></p>
<p>What Mez attains, that Cohen, in his search for greater legibility, does not attempt, is the feat of keeping us in motion from one view/read cusp to the next, seeding the screen with many cues for reading backwards, up and down, and slantwise, as well as forward. Indeed, we are often stopped in our tracks, caught in a kind of pleasurable stutter and thrown back to rescan the whole field, a perceptual act more often associated with image. Mez’s text/image pictures allow for multiple, plural, and contradictory readings of her text. In her article, “The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing,” Mez (2000) lists fourteen goals or techniques, which include:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">2 phone.tic[k-tock]aulli m-bellish a tract ov text in2 a neo.logistic maze;</p>
<p class="longQuotation">2 network 2 the hilt N create de[e]pen.den[ting]cies on email lizts for the wurkz dis.purse.all;</p>
<p class="longQuotation">2 uze computer kode kon.[e]vent.ionz spliced with irc emoticons and ab[scess]breviations.</p>
<p>She says, in an e-mail to the Webartery list [December 20, “Visual Minds” thread (2001a)]: “I personally tend 2 b drawn 2wards the fragment, the smaller echos/works, and I think this reflects my n.herent need 2 m.ulate the network packet/communication mentality….” She is drawn, that is, to emulate her partner, the network, to follow its lead even as she leads it through her constructions.</p>
<p>By contrast, Jim Andrews (2001a), who gives us the term “langu(im)age,” works with individual letters which he can animate and overlay with sequences of sound loops in his <span class="booktitle">Nio</span> (figure 15.3) engine.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/nio15-3.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.3: Jim Andrews, Nio</span></span></p>
<p>He is not primarily, or at all, concerned with providing a reading experience. He says:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Much of my work is lettristic in the sense that rather than working with words and extended texts, I work with individual letters. Part of my attraction to working this way is philosophical and sonical… but part of it is also out of interest in treating literary objects/material, and individual letters are quite well suited to such treatment. Individual letters are graphically more interesting than whole words… [they] take up less memory, and are thereby manipulated more quickly. And they spin nicer than words do, for instance, because of their shapes. There is more variety in their shapes than there is in words. And they are quite mysterious to me. Geometry and basic architectures of language. (E-mail to Webartery list, February 10, 2001, on thread “re: teaser 2” [2001b])</p>
<p>Later, he says: “… it’s really when you get down to the word and the letter, rather than the paragraph, that language cracks open and code spills out” [Webartery list, February 24, on thread “checkout counter”]. One feels the difference from the stenographic model, a model of accommodation rather than breaking and entering. But one also feels, and can sympathize with, an attraction to a different arena, the world of the purely sonic and visual, where compounds stay themselves and are thereby experienced more fluidly. However, oscillation does occur in Andrews’s <span class="booktitle">Nio</span>, between the visual and the sonic elements, and this oscillation is elegant, playful, and deeply pleasing.</p>
<p>My own work investigates oscillation between image, text, sound, and animation, both within and between linked units. In this way, several states or layers of oscillation, a set of cross-rhythms, come into being.</p>
<p>In 1995, I translated my book-length poem <span class="booktitle">True North</span> to Storyspace. The <span class="booktitle">True North</span> themes of navigation and embeddedness moved from being print <span class="lightEmphasis">concepts</span>, refracted in language, to being the steering <span class="lightEmphasis">mechanism</span> and constitutive <span class="lightEmphasis">structure</span> of the hypertext. The Storyspace software provides many ways to operate the poem, but they are not intuitive: to move fluidly one must spend time learning the rich interface. For this textually driven work about navigation, I designed the two most important orienting elements to be visual. The first of these is a set of mouse-drawn Storyspace maps. Figure 15.4 shows two of them, “The Mother-Lost World” and “There Was an Old Woman.” Figure 15.5 shows two others, maps of the sections called “Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind” and “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting-In Numbers.”</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-4.jpg" width="400" height="274" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.4: Maps from True North: “The Mother-Lost World” and “There Was an Old Woman”</span></span></p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-5.jpg" width="400" height="266" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.5: Maps from True North: “Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind” and “Numbers Nesting in Numbers-Nesting-In Numbers”</span></span></p>
<p>The emblematic map shapes, with their legends of node names, can be read by themselves. These sitemaps, functioning as pattern poems, give a very fair idea or sampling of <span class="booktitle">True North</span> – a mode of understanding that may supplement, or substitute for, following links and reading text. Such a displacement of text by image, that also functions recursively as a guide to text, is itself a distinct mode of oscillation – one which coexists with the familiar reference oscillation between a map and what it maps.</p>
<p>The coloring of a few words on each page is the second orienting device (figure 15.6). Since Storyspace does not use color to signify text-links, instead requiring the reader to press a key to reveal boxes around link words, each color operates visually to suggest a connection between similarly colored words: each color is an embedded link, but one traceable only by human memory, not by software.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-6.jpg" width="400" height="289" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.6: Word colors suggest connections, but not places to click</span></span></p>
<p>A different kind and rate of oscillation occurs in <span class="booktitle">To Be Here as Stone Is</span> (1999), a digital poem written collaboratively with M. D. Coverley. This poem is composed of two very different sorts of screens: six highly visual ones with sound that use complex Anfy Java applets (figure 15.7) and thirteen primarily textual ones where lines of verse are overlaid on a visual background (figures 15.8a and 15.8b) itself layered with a text ribbon. The links between these promote a rapid exchange between two kinds of attention, between primary viewing/listening and primary reading/searching, for the links must be sought for, by cursor scanning, on the textual pages. The experience of strongly discernable shift resonates with the text of this poem that shifts the reader from photons to cosmos and back.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-7.jpg" width="400" height="230" /></p>
<div align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.7: A Java applet screen in To Be Here as Stone Is</span></span></div>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-8a.jpg" width="400" height="234" /></p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-8b.jpg" width="400" height="234" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.8a and Figure 15.8b: Primarily textual screens in To Be Here as Stone Is</span></span></p>
<p>In the Flash poem, <span class="booktitle">Errand Upon Which We Came</span>, Coverley and I (2000/2001) choreographed animation for the alphabetic text as well as for accompanying images and sound. The reader/operator of this text may press the silver butterfly to the screen if she wishes to read with complete accuracy, but she may prefer to oscillate between sampled reading and periods of viewing. The words of Errand address the reader, speak to her of fragmented mobile text; speak to her, in fact, of the very act of reading she has undertaken: in response, she may actively intervene in the poem to read or redirect it, or she may attend to it as a movie.</p>
<p>In figure 15.9, we see a moment in the life of the Flash stanza that begins with the question “space?” floating down from the top of the screen, followed by a second question about knowledge-mining. A flock of butterflies flies in from upper right and circles around toward screen center. A third and fourth question, about “go(o)ds” refusing to go to market, appear onscreen. They imitate the butterflies’ circling motion. At the end of the Flash movie we see two dimnesses in the central far distance, one, the almost out-of-sight V of butterflies; the other, the lines of the last two questions, now collapsed to one extremely faint line poised at the butterflies like a lance. The question is posed visually as to whether the image and text must attack each other, or may perhaps exist in oscillating accommodation.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-9.jpg" width="400" height="232" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.9: Moment of Errand Upon Which We Came</span></span></p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span> (Strickland 1999), coded with the help of Janet Holmes, creates a seeming disjunction of image and text on each of its 33 similarly designed pages. The pages are highly visual, but their unmoving text asks to be read. Images from Jean-Pierre Hébert’s (1999) <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span> – a device shown at SIGGRAPH 1999 that inscribes algorithmic patterns in sand with a steel ball – are the ones most prevalent in the <span class="booktitle">Ballad</span>. In figure 15.10 both <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span> and a <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span> pattern can be seen. Other images suggestive of digital or mathematical culture, such as a Metro card, webcam photos, a core dump, or an animated fractal, accompany the text of a love poem, a ballad of love gone wrong or at least not entirely right, between two characters called Sand and Soot. At one level, the disjunction of image and text mirrors the difficulties of this pair; however, the particular discordance, or nonreference, that seems to exist <span class="lightEmphasis">between</span> image and text will, at some point, spring into resonant oscillation for the reader who either sees, or reads, an avatar of carbon-based chemistry in Harry Soot and one of silicon life in Sand.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/room15-10.jpg" width="200" height="134" /></p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/sandsoot15-10x.jpg" width="311" height="230" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.10: Sisyphus and a Sisyphus pattern</span></span></p>
<p>Four key images in the <span class="booktitle">Ballad</span> were created by Alex Heilner and shown at the Sixth Annual Digital Salon. On his contributor page within the <span class="booktitle">Ballad</span>, Heilner (Strickland 1999) explains: “This series of `microbe’ images… seeks to invert traditional understanding of our internal and external environments. Large, orthogonal, built objects… have been re-imagined here to represent the most basic organic living beings….”</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/steph15-11.jpg" width="400" height="231" /></p>
<p align="center"><span class="emphasis"><span class="caption">Figure 15.11: Manhattan as microbes</span></span></p>
<p>Thus, in figure 15.11, we see that Heilner has represented the island of Manhattan so that it reads as a collection of floating microbes. Scale is elided on the Web, as it is in the stenographer’s practice, where events in the conference room, in her brain, in her hand, and on her code-filled writing machine are nearly simultaneous. Many different scales can be present to the same screen, as if they belonged together, as if they cohered there as “naturally” as they do in the stenographer’s body. But a change in scale is a change of context: the view/read cusp will shift differently for zoomed text than it will for text that is panned. In fact, this kind of zoom or scale-changing cusp may be a particularly important one in a world where we are asked to process simultaneously scales from the nano to the cosmic.</p>
<p>Delivered to and through new media, we find new understandings. Delivered to and through new media, the bitstream displays varying modalities that our bodies and brains have long been used to processing differently. We shift differently, we censor differently, we move differently, to sound, to text, to image, and to animation. Today, perforce, we are learning to oscillate differently, in new “ratios,” as Blake or McLuhan would say. The stenographer at her stenotype was an early pioneer of this environment. Her continual active choice to attend or to blur her focus, to remain poised or to flow within the moving stream, is a task we take up. We will not all take it up the same way. We bring many biophysical and cultural heritages to the task. It is for this reason that my collaborators and I choose to make work that can be operated, and thus read, across many modalities at many rates and rhythms of oscillation.</p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/pathpicking">Camille Utterback responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/somatic">Rita Raley responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/stenographied">Stephanie Strickland responds</a></p>
<h2>References:</h2>
<p>Andrews, Jim (2001a). <span class="booktitle">Nio</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Nio/">http://www.turbulence.org/Works/Nio/</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2001b). E-mail to Webartery list, February 10, 2001, on thread “re: teaser 2.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery">http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2001c). E-mail to Webartery list, February 24, 2001, on thread “check out counter.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery">http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery</a>.</p>
<p>Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin (1999). <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>Bush, Vannevar (prepared by Deny Duchier) (1994). “As We May Think.” <a href="http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/">http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/vbush/</a>. [dead link]</p>
<p>Coverley, M.D., and Stephanie Strickland (1999). “To Be Here As Stone Is.” <span class="booktitle">Riding the Meridian</span> 1, no. 2 (1999). <a class="outbound" href="http://califia.hispeed.com/SI/stone1.htm">http://califia.hispeed.com/SI/stone1.htm</a>.</p>
<p>—., and Stephanie Strickland (2000/2001). “Errand Upon Which We Came.” <span class="booktitle">Cauldron &amp; Net</span> 3 (Winter/Spring 2000/2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://califia.hispeed.com/Errand/title1a.htm">http://califia.hispeed.com/Errand/title1a.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Cohen, Michael (1992). “Blush and Zebrackets: Two Schemes for Typographical Representation of Nested Associativity.” <span class="booktitle">Visible Language</span> 26, no.3/4 (1992): 436-449.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine (2000). Commentary section of “The Dinner Party.” <span class="booktitle">Riding the Meridian</span> 2, no. 1 (Spring 2000). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/templates/Dinner/hayles.htm">http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/templates/Dinner/hayles.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Hébert, Jean-Pierre (1999). <span class="booktitle">Sisyphus</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://hebert.kitp.ucsb.edu/sand/sand.html">http://hebert.kitp.ucsb.edu/sand/sand.html</a>.</p>
<p>Joyce, Michael (2000). <span class="booktitle">Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture</span>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.</p>
<p>Lanham, Richard A. (1993). <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p>
<p>Memmott, Talan (2000). “Lexia to Perplexia.” <span class="booktitle">The Iowa Review Web</span> (September 2000). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html">http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2001). Interview, <span class="booktitle">Rhizome</span>, January 16, 2001. <a class="outbound" href="http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2145">http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?2145</a>.</p>
<p>Mez (Mary Anne Breeze) (2000a). E-mail to Webartery list, December 20, 2000, on thread “Visual Mind.” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery">http://www.egroups.com/community/webartery</a>.</p>
<p>—. (2000b). “The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing: Constructing Polysemic &amp; Neology Fic/Factions Online.” <span class="booktitle">Beehive</span> 3, no. 4 (December 2000). <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com">http://beehive.temporalimage.com</a>.</p>
<p>Rosenberg, Jim (1996). “Barrier Frames.” <span class="booktitle">Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext</span> 2, no. 3 (1996). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.well.com/user/jer/j/barrier_frames_4.html">http://www.well.com/user/jer/j/barrier_frames_4.html</a>.</p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie (1999). <span class="booktitle">Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot</span>. WordCircuits. <a class="outbound" href="http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/">http://wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/</a>.</p>
<p>—. (1999). <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/perception">“To Be Both in Touch and in Control,”</a> <span class="booktitle">ebr</span> 9 (Spring 1999).</p>
<p>—. (1998). <span class="booktitle">True North</span>. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/vannevar-bush">vannevar bush</a>, <a href="/tags/memex">memex</a>, <a href="/tags/stenography">stenography</a>, <a href="/tags/encoding">encoding</a>, <a href="/tags/decoding">decoding</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/altx">altx</a>, <a href="/tags/trace">trace</a>, <a href="/tags/oscillation">oscillation</a>, <a href="/tags/flickering">flickering</a>, <a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-lanham">richard lanham</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-bolter">jay bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-grusin">richard grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/remediation">remediation</a>, <a href="/tags/jim-rosenberg">jim rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/mez">mez</a>, <a href="/tags/mary-anne-breeze">mary-anne breeze</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator990 at http://electronicbookreview.comMetaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia (sidebar)http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/haylessidebar
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Katherine Hayles</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-03</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>
<span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesone.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p>
<p>
<span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylestwo.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p>
<p>
<span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesthree.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p>
<p>
<span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesfour.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span></p>
<p>
<span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/haylesfive.jpg" width="912" height="581" /></span><br /><span class="caption">23.sidebar.1-5. Screenshots of Lexia to Perplexia (2000).</span></p>
<p style="text-align:right">back to <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/creole">Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1060 at http://electronicbookreview.comNew Readingshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/x%3Dreader
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Pat Harrigan</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2005-04-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Oulipopo - a younger relative of the Oulipo - explores the potential of the mystery story, describing and creating new configurations of the elements that compose the mystery genre. The group’s 1971 founding text, by Oulipo cofounder François Le Lionnais (1998), asks in its title, “Who is Guilty?” Of the many possible answers, Le Lionnais considers numerous examples from the literature - although one possibility has no example: “x = the reader.”</p>
<p>This configuration, in which the reader is guilty, would seem impossible in a mystery story. For a computer game, on the other hand, it might seem to be the easiest configuration - the design of id’s <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> (Green, Petersen, and Romero 1993) being much simpler to emulate than Infocom’s <span class="booktitle">Deadline</span> (Blank 1982). Yet there is clearly something incorrect about the comparison. In what sense, after all, is the player of <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> a reader? <cite id="note_1">Establishing that the <span class="booktitle">Doom</span> player is a murderer is left as an exercise for the reader.</cite> It may be that the term “reader” should not be used here.</p>
<p>And yet, the <span class="booktitle">Deadline</span> player clearly is a reader - and something more, or at least something different. What’s taking place here? To begin to answer, the three essays in this section fashion new modes of thinking to grapple with new forms of reading. Or perhaps it would be better to say that they create new theoretical positions appropriate to emerging textual forms - for although there have certainly been critical discussions of responsive texts in the past, much of these discussions have focused on concepts not appropriate to the works discussed here.</p>
<p>The first text under consideration is Talan Memmott’s (2000) <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> - which <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/creole">N. Katherine Hayles</a>, in her essay, describes as her “tutor text,” for exploring ways that computation and network technologies are “fundamentally altering the ways in which humans conceive of themselves and their relations to others.” <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is a work built on and of the web, pushing web techniques to their limits, and requiring a reading that constantly adjusts to its unpredictable modes. In the next essay, <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/signed-up">Jill Walker</a> offers a reading of <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> (Bevan and Wright 2000-01), a technically wide-ranging Internet work that incorporates web pages, e-mail, streaming video, and response forms, as well as audience-tracking and customization techniques. Not only does <span class="booktitle">Online Caroline</span> require a new type of reading - it also produces a new permutation of “Who is Guilty?” in which the reader becomes an accomplice to murder. In this section’s final essay, <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/formalist">Nick Montfort</a> considers a class of works known as Interactive Fiction - a class to which <span class="booktitle">Deadline</span> belongs, as well as the landmark <span class="booktitle">Zork</span> (Anderson, Blank, Daniels, and Lebling 1977-79) - which still boasts a culture of active authors and readers, who use freely available tools to create new work and distribute it over the Internet. Montfort locates his essay within our continuing story/game discussion, and defines a number of possible categories of experience that may expand this discussion beyond the dualism.</p>
<p>As the last essay in this book, it is fitting that Montfort’s respondents are <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/playpattern">Brenda Laurel</a> and <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/homonym">Janet Murray</a> - two of the founders of the cyberdramatic perspective with which our discussion began. In this volume the editors have attempted to group together thematically similar essays, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that any of the essays included here could be fruitfully compared with any other - and that we have convened this wide-ranging discussion specifically because it is not possible to understand this emerging field without such a diverse assemblage of viewpoints. We hope that this book may serve as a sort of core sample of the new media “story, performance, and game” field at this stage in its development, and that as this field continues to expand, it will prove useful to the next generation of new media practitioners.</p>
<h2>Response</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/newsflash">Matthew Kirschenbaum’s response to New Readings</a></p>
<h2>Reference: Literature</h2>
<p>Le Lionnais, François (1998). “Who is Guilty?” translated by Iain White. In <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span>, edited by Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie. London: Atlas Press, 269-270.</p>
<h2>References: Games</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Zork</span>. Timothy Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling; Infocom. 1977-79.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>. Mark Blank; Infocom. 1982.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Doom</span>. Shawn R. Green, Sandy Petersen, and John Romero; id Software. 1993.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/oulipopo">oulipopo</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/francois-le-lionnais">francois le lionnais</a>, <a href="/tags/who-guilty">who is guilty</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo-compendium">oulipo compendium</a>, <a href="/tags/doom">doom</a>, <a href="/tags/deadline">deadline</a>, <a href="/tags/infocom">infocom</a>, <a href="/tags/id">id</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/katherine-hayles">Katherine Hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/metaphoric-networks-lexia-perplexia">metaphoric networks in lexia to perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/jill-walker">jill walker</a>, <a href="/tags/how-i-was-played-online-caroline">how i was played by online caroline</a>, <a href="/tags/nick-m">nick m</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1059 at http://electronicbookreview.comBill Seaman's responsehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/enfolding
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Bill Seaman</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/creole">Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>When we address “Metaphoric Networks in <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> ” the concept of understanding computers as environments becomes important. The computer enables us to explore new forms of authorship and inter-authorship. As multivalent functional machines, computers make possible new approaches to the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, often employing metaphor in a salient manner. The potential of the computer to augment communication and understanding - as well as to provide new perspectives related to knowledge acquisition, meaning production, and human consciousness - becomes subtly enfolded in <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>. Yet, disruptive language use, miscommunication, ambiguity, personalized language forms and punning playfulness also embody the potential for evocative meta-collapses of meaning production. These evocative meta-collapses invariably extend meaning through their rich poetic ambiguity, generating a kind of oscillation between meaning and meaning collapse. This is where Memmott enfolds theory and practice within an experiential frame. He enables theoretical concerns to be addressed within an experiential mixed-semiotic network of resonant meaning oscillations.</p>
<p>The environmental qualities that the computer and related systems of connectivity provide open out what some might consider new language potentials. Bolter and Grusin in <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span> describe the process of new media forms being constructed out of older media. Certainly this is partially true of computer-based environments. Yet the computer opens up some new language potentials that stem from the operative nature of cybernetic systems, the mutability of media-elements in computer-based environmental space, the spatial nature of environments and the distributed/connective nature that such systems enable.</p>
<p>When we speak of “metaphoric networks” one must begin to consider what relation metaphor has to computer code and the generation of computer-based media-elements. One can not underestimate the importance of metaphor in communication processes.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Metaphor - A transferring to one word the sense of another, from metaphorein; meta, over and pherein, to bear. A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another different thing by being spoken of as if it were that other; implied comparison, in which a word of phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another. [ <span class="booktitle">Webster’s</span> ]</p>
<p>This response text was itself written within the framing environment of the “desktop metaphor.” Inside this metaphor one asks, where does the metaphor leave off and the text take over? We look at the computer screen closely and we see a set or field of pixels. The pixels are presented through an underlying code functioning within a particular software/hardware environment. This software/hardware environment enables the creation of a particular “language” space. The pixels form patterns that look like words or images. We read these patterns as words or images or some word/image hybrid. Thus, this light configuration is “likened” to a word or image or word/image hybrid and we understand it as such. We compare the environment of the screen to our embodied memory of past relationships, gleaning the shape of words and images, symbols, formulas - patterns. In general these are not fixed figures in <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, presented through the auspices of the computer - they are generated, malleable and operative time-based configurations that are authored to be responsive to interactive exploration. Thus we might describe computer networks themselves as being literal and “metaphoric networks” in that they enable the circulation of metaphors through technological means. We have the vehicle of light, hardware/software, and connectivity, forming an evocative, richly ambiguous, extended environment of “implied comparison” brought about through cognition. The computer also enables the nesting of metaphor, in that the word or image produced through light configurations can also function as a metaphor in itself.</p>
<p>Memmott’s choice to explore the notion of codes on a series of different levels, in light of the above, becomes quite interesting. This includes the misuse of standard textual codes through the employment of non-standard punctuation, the displacement of mathematical symbols, the rebus-like exploration of textual and symbolic formulas, the displacement/replacement of computer-based code words, the creative employment of symbols as well as the exploration of context-relevant neologisms. This text of light embodies an oscillation between computer-based code and text, as well as between the literal and the metaphorical. Often Memmott disrupts the textual meaning in the service of generating graphical and/or pictorial meaning. The work also oscillates between self-referentiality and external reference. The conceptual territory that the work reveals is elusive. Does the computer present an environmental territory or the dissolution of territory, or a form of territorial oscillation?</p>
<p>The work also invites exploration of an extended notion of “creole”: “A creole is a new language that arises when two different language communities come into contact.” This exploration of creole potentially moves beyond the integration of English with programming languages. If we also consider images, glyphs, and symbols to be “language,” here Memmott is perhaps beginning to address a mixed-semiotic creole that merges visual language with textual language - here both languages are supported by an underlying code language and operational variables functioning within a particular connective computer-based hardware environment. Even if one does not accept this as a computer-related extension of linguistic creole, one can consider the work to be functioning as a “metaphoric network” that is likened to the concept of creole through the environmental neighboring of image, text and code, where the “code” operates on multiple levels.</p>
<p>This creole embodies a circulation of “codes” and their disruption including the textual, the imagistic/graphical, and through computer-based code-related text and symbols. This “creolization” is accomplished through a series of textual puns and visual word/graphic/code plays as well as through the operative nature of the interactive encoded environment. The narrative that one gleans through navigation of this environment is associative and generates a rich conceptual field. The operative, mixed-semiotic nature of the environment enables the exploration of meaning potentials brought about through dynamic interaction.</p>
<p>A hinting at “metamorphosis” oscillates and envelops both human and machine change within the “posthuman” cybernetic circuit. Memmott constantly explores multi-language condensations, generating a shifting flow of evocations. We might say that he is exploring meta-metamorphosis. Such a strategy of oscillation moves between resonance and collapse - between the legible and the illegible in a sphere of meaning production that enfolds sense, nonsense and the extended sense of his created language. The work is a machine of attraction and repulsion which drives the interactant to continue despite the ambiguities, drawing them into the game of deciphering this multi-modal media environment.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> is experienced through the oscillating body of an image/text that enfolds the performative with the semiotic polyvalent. At one moment we literally bring about the collapse of textual legibility at the service of graphic resonance - the literal and metaphorical layering of “texts.” The “terminal identity” of the image/text creole is made operative through interactivity. Meaning emerges through computer-based use. The work operates on the associative powers of the interactant - a delicate equation that balances the meaning force of words, symbols, text, and images in an ongoing process of evocative experiential meaning “summing.” Peirce states that “meaning is that which the sign conveys” [Peirce, 171]. Here we are exploring a circulation of shifting sign configurations.</p>
<p>Our new task is to define approaches to this image/text/code creole in part through the literal and metaphorical understanding of “syntax, verb forms, and vocabulary.” We must also recognize how new “hybrid” languages might function differently from the “languages” that they are born of. These new “hybrid-languages” need not generate meaning based on the rules we have become accustomed to through our long history with textual meaning production. Perhaps as the creole between the language of images and texts (of various kinds) is explored, we need to define new elucidating approaches to meaning production that are environmentally appropriate to this enfolding of mixed-semiotic collections, light patterns and operative processes.</p>
<p>We are now at the point of exploring an expanded set of media-element collections in computer-based environments, as an extension of language as we know it (notice I avoid the term media-vocabulary). We are also becoming involved with the potentials of computer-based processes that become operative in general computer-based environments. We must expand the nature of the concept of creole to address the variable media-neighborings that are generative of meaning in mutable, interactive, computer-based, authored environments. Beside the languages of texts, code, symbols and 2D images, we should also include the languages of digital sound, 3D images, digital video, etc. We must begin to address the complex meanings embodied in avatars, bots, and other new responsive computer-based entities and forms. Our collection of mixed-semiotic media elements and processes should also include an extended understanding of media-behaviors - the potentials of encoding behavior, of artificial life and artificial intelligence as applied to authored poetic computer-based media-environments. In particular we must come to understand how computer-based spaces enable new environmental qualities of meaning production. We should also include the relevance of the interface, and of extended context as elements of meaning exploration - enfolding the computer-environment with the potentials of differing forms of embodied experience in the world-at-large.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999</p>
<p>Peirce, Charles Sanders. <span class="booktitle">Collected Papers</span>, Volume I-VIII. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931, p.171</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary</span>, Dorset and Baber, 1983</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/fleshcode">Eugene Thacker responds</a></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/materialmetaphor">N. Katherine Hayles responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/creole">creole</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-bolter">jay bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-grusin">richard grusin</a>, <a href="/tags/websters-dictionary">webster&#039;s dictionary</a>, <a href="/tags/code">code</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/charles-sanders-peirce">charles sanders peirce</a>, <a href="/tags/embodiment">embodiment</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1056 at http://electronicbookreview.comEugene Thacker's response (excerpt)http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/fleshcode
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Eugene Thacker</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-04-02</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/creole">Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It is this feeling of being overwhelmed by a complexly sensitized work that may form one point of departure for the body-technology interface in hypertext works. The connection here is, as Hayles points out, multiple and neuronal; the dynamic character of the text prompts a range of actions in the computer user, which in turn completes one turn of the cybernetic loop in the dynamic text. What is happening in such instances? One suggestion – which Hayles alludes to – is that a particular type of network is in the process of being formed: “To create new kinds of textual bodies is inevitably to write new human bodies, as we continue to produce the technologies that produce us.” Whether this relationship is benign or antagonistic ultimately depends on the particular hypertext under consideration. But what works like <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> demonstrate for us is that there is always tension, dynamism, and a certain ambivalence in this relationship between flesh and code.</p>
<p>To extend Hayles’ reading of <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, we might take this mediated relationship between bodies and technologies a little further: If the body of the subject engages in a kind of distributed agency in “reading” works such as <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, then what happens to the specificity of the embodied subject as marked by gender, race, language, and cultural difference? In other words, <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span>, in articulating a relationship between flesh and code, also puts a challenge to us: to what degree does language account for the markers and meanings of embodied difference? To what degree does it account for our relationships to technology and media?</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/materialmetaphor">N. Katherine Hayles responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/embodiment">embodiment</a>, <a href="/tags/authorship">authorship</a>, <a href="/tags/code">code</a>, <a href="/tags/semiotics">semiotics</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/media">media</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1054 at http://electronicbookreview.comCamille Utterback's responsehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/pathpicking
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Camille Utterback</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-05</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/stenorthographic">Moving Through Me as I Move</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Our interaction with digitally represented information ranges from more passive “path-picking” or navigating activities to more active “mark-making” or authoring activities. Strickland’s “moving through” paradigm for interaction describes forms of engaged reading and attention-shifting made accessible by hyperlinked media. The metaphor of “moving through me while I move,” however, leaves out the more active types of interactivity encompassed by role-playing, world-building, communicating, and creating - modes of interactivity where users’ own mark-making is a primary activity. While Strickland initially claims that “`move through me as I move’ is as much the `voice’ of a hypertext as it is of the writer/encoder,” her examples, with the exception of Jim Andrews’ <span class="booktitle">Nio</span> piece, leave the user in a position of a focus-shifting reader/viewer, not in the position of speaker or mark-maker. While the stenographer’s ability to shift her focus as information moves through her seems an apt metaphor for the examples Strickland cites, there is no correlate in her examples to the stenographer’s tape - to the stenographer’s ability to leave a record of her work.</p>
<p>The pieces Strickland cites by Memmott, Rosenberg, Mez, and herself all require participation from the reader as they click on links, try to operate written “appliances,” or engage in deciphering a complicated interplay between the visual and written. In Memmott or Rosenberg’s work, the user’s actions are exploratory as they try to learn the effect of their decisions. In Strickland’s work, one learns to “find one’s way” through the composition - never knowing the effect of clicking on a particular link until that path has been explored. Strickland spends much time discussing how the authors she cites craft the oscillation between the visual and written in their works, but <span class="booktitle">Nio</span> is the only example where the users can actively and intentionally determine the arrangement of the elements for themselves. Nio is the only example that provides users with the tools to create their own compositions. While <span class="booktitle">Nio</span> does not give users the opportunity to create their own unique marks, it does provides cumulative, if temporary, visual evidence of the user’s decisions as they rearrange and combine predefined elements.</p>
<p>Mark-making is not an essential element of an interactive work, but it seems a necessary component for a stenographic model of interactivity. The marks left by a real stenographer are, in fact, the main purpose of her toils. She makes marks so that information can be conveyed between individuals, so that information can be passed on and communicated. The stenographer may also leave unintentional marks - the smudge of the ink on her tape, the accidental drip of coffee. Both the intentional and accidental mark-making abilities of the real stenographer contrast the purely navigational role of the user in most hyperlinked journeys through digital media.</p>
<p>Intentional mark-making is often an active product of creativity, but unintentional mark-making is at the very least a sign of our human presence. Our presence in the real world leaves scuff marks and wears down edges. When our interactions with digital space provide us neither a way to make marks, nor to leave casual evidence of our passing, how can our travels affect the experience of others that come after us? How does one find the well-trodden paths? Where are the grease stains on the most loved pages? Even our casual marks communicate meaning. The lack of these marks in the digital realm informs much of what feels sterile about our travels there. Part of what catches the stenographer’s attention is precisely the unintentional.</p>
<p>If the stenographer is our model of interactivity, her physical situation should also be examined. Impulses may be flowing through the stenographer’s nerves as she translates and encodes, but when does she get to get up out of her chair and move? Can she walk out of the office and start to dance? Can she ever move with or against another body? Strickland’s “move through me as I move” paradigm relies on the <span class="lightEmphasis">idea</span> of motion, but it is important to note that the <span class="lightEmphasis">physical</span> movement of the stenographer - or of the user in her examples - at best consists of her fingers typing and clicking.</p>
<p>As we develop new systems and tools for interaction, there will certainly be room for many modes of interactivity. Navigational, mark-making, and physically engaged forms of interaction should all be explored. Amongst these many possibilities, Strickland’s paradigm, while poetically voiced, describes a predominantly navigational mode of interaction. Physically, the examples cited are all limited to an engaged viewer/reader sitting at a monitor and making choices via a mouse. My hope is that our visions for interactivity will extend to include more complex forms of engagement for the user, and more actively involve our bodies.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/somatic">Rita Raley responds</a></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/stenographied">Stephanie Strickland responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/stephanie-strickland">stephanie strickland</a>, <a href="/tags/jim-andrews">jim andrews</a>, <a href="/tags/nio">nio</a>, <a href="/tags/mez">mez</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/jim-rosenberg">jim rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1012 at http://electronicbookreview.comN. Katherine Hayles respondshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/intereactive
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Katherine Hayles</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-01-08</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/machanimate">Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In calling for an ethics of interactive art, Simon Penny makes crucially important points about how interactive simulations differ from visual representations. Although his primary emphasis is on interactive simulations rather than literary hypertexts, he points out that his argument also applies to the changed conditions under which readers experience electronic literature compared to print works. “In hypertext, the aesthetic work is as much in the design of the system which will present text according to the user’s behavior, as it is in the construction of the textual elements themselves.” As Paul Connerton notes in <span class="booktitle">How Societies Remember</span>, ritual motions and physical habits have an emotional force that can persist long after one’s conscious attitudes have changed; hence the emphasis among revolutionary movements on new modes of gesture, posture, and other movements. Physical motions, especially when they become habitual, carry meanings that influence thought, even though they may remain below the level of conscious attention. To perform a ritual such as kneeling in church, for example, carries implications of obedience and subservience even though one’s conscious thoughts may be entirely otherwise.</p>
<p>What implications are generated by the reading practices required by electronic environments, compared to print? With print, the reader’s physical activity is limited to the relatively trivial action of turning pages. Regardless of how fast or slow the page is turned, the words remain durably inscribed, immune to the reader’s manipulations (short of such drastic actions as cutting or folding the pages). With electronic hypertext, however, the reader absorbs new assumptions about the nature of textuality through physical engagement with the electronic text - assumptions all the more powerful because they are absorbed through physical actions rather than conscious reflection. These assumptions I will call cognitive entailments, because they constitute a form of bodily cognition with powerful implications for what the text means. In recognition of these cognitive entailments, I will henceforth refer to the reader as an “interactor,” a term that more accurately captures the nature of reading in electronic environments.</p>
<p>Consider for example the physical motions involved in the text I discuss in my essay for <span class="booktitle">First Person</span>, Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia.” The screen design includes mouseovers that change the text and images when the cursor touches certain areas. Since there are frequently no indications in the design where these points occur, the interactor is apt to suddenly lose a screen of text in the middle of reading and be unable to recover it without extensive backtracking and exploration. These physical enactments teach the interactor, on a level below consciousness, that the text is very unstable, or to put it metaphorically, highly “nervous” and apt to “over-react” to the slightest motion, even unintended motion, by the user. The effect is to “perplex” the interactor in ways that are different but complementary to the perplexing verbal constructions created by the neologisms and creole expressions. Among the cognitive entailments of the physical enactions is the idea that the text “has a mind of its own,” or more precisely that the text as a procedure enacted by the computer has cognitions independent of the interactor’s conscious intentionality. Yet since the interactor’s actions do trigger the changes, there is also the implication of relationality, but a relationality much more complex than that indicated, for example, by a simple “click here” link, where the computer is implicitly constructed as a passive servant confined to carrying out the user’s desires.</p>
<p>We desperately need aesthetic theories adequate to account for these kinds of effects. During the decades when post-structuralism was teaching us valuable lessons about the power of discourse, the body was largely understood as an effect of discursive constructions. With the advent of sophisticated electronic literature and art, it is time to recover a sense of the body as a site for embodied cognition, cognition constructed not through words but through physical interactions with procedural works. Simon Penny makes an important beginning when he points out that “critiques of representation derived from painting, photography, film and video are inadequate for discussing the power of interactive experience.”</p>
<p>In a significant sense, the electronic text is a process rather than an object. As Penny observes, it does not exist as such except when its procedures are processed and/or compiled by the computer. It can be argued that print texts too require “compiling” by the reader’s cognitive system before they exist as art works. Granted - but the processing required for an electronic work to exist is <span class="lightEmphasis">in addition and necessarily prior to the interactor’s decodings</span>. The ink marks that make up print words and images exist even before the user opens the book or glances at the page, but electronic words and images do not exist on the screen unless and until the procedures that generate them are enacted by the computer. For the interactor to be able to decode the words, the computer must first decode the procedural text and carry out the multiple encoding operations required to generate the screen images. This simply has no parallel with print, and the consequences that flow from this difference are complex, diverse, and extensive. All of which is of course grist for the artist’s mill, for it presents a vast new playground to experiment with artistic effects and their entwining relation with the interactor’s embodied enactions.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/enviroethical">Eugene Thacker responds</a></p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/litphysical">Simon Penny responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/paul-connerton">paul connerton</a>, <a href="/tags/how-societies-remember">how societies remember</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/lexia-perplexia">Lexia to Perplexia</a>, <a href="/tags/cognition">cognition</a>, <a href="/tags/cognitive-science">cognitive science</a>, <a href="/tags/simon-penny">simon penny</a>, <a href="/tags/electronic-literature">electronic literature</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator964 at http://electronicbookreview.comFrom Work to Playhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/molecular
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Stuart Moulthrop</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-05-20</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>Play Suspended</h2>
<p>This essay got its start in my keynote remarks for the Digital Arts and Culture Conference in the Spring of 2001 and took its present form during the Summer and Fall of that unforgettable year. Those were not easy months in which to think about changes in media and culture, however momentous. With the implosion of the Internet bubble, the future that had recently looked so glorious tumbled suddenly from promise to delusion. A popular song from those days sardonically recalls “the time when new media / was the big idea,” suggesting that even nostalgia had come to work on Internet time. Or had that sort of time run out? As the digital generation’s ecstatic orbit swung through the dark side of the business cycle, some wondered if the abrupt end of the boom might send the American economy into the same dismal straits as the Japanese (Krugman 2001). To make matters vastly worse, September saw the infamous terror attacks that killed thousands in the U.S. and touched off a conflict of indefinite scope and duration. Much indeed has changed.</p>
<p>With troops on the ground and war talk in the air it has become difficult to give much space to art, literature, and other forms of cultural production, let alone their critical controversies. The going gets even harder if one’s concerns run less to the polite than the popular, not to novels or plays but to games and simulations. The subject of play is inherently troublesome in a postindustrial or neo-Taylorist regime, even without economic troubles or terrorist threats. Yet games and play demand serious attention even in such times as these, and perhaps especially now. As Donna Haraway observed in 1985, “we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system – from all work to all play, a deadly game” (Haraway 1991, 161). Some might describe this shift as decline or decadence, a falling away from moral certitude into confusion or relativism – a weakness hardly to be tolerated in wartime. But such dismissals obscure the primary significance of the change.</p>
<p>As people explore the affordances of digital communications networks, social institutions and practices take on different characters, moving from what Pierre Lévy calls the “molar” or mass form of industrial society toward a more intimately networked “molecular” state (Lévy 1997, 40-42). This transition affects all modes and sectors of the social, from commerce and politics to language and culture; and it continues despite the exigencies of geopolitics. The developments discussed in this chapter – a shift from narrative to ludic engagement with texts and from interpretation to configuration as a dominant approach to information systems – are in fact inevitably implicated in the current upheavals of society. This is true enough in the general sense that terror victimizes whole nations; also in the sense that the world’s current divisions reflect what Haraway calls an “informatics of domination” (Haraway 1991, 161) that increasingly polarizes the liberal and the fundamentalist. However, there may also be more specific links between the emerging culture of serious play and the crises of the new century.</p>
<p>In the turn from consumption to participation, from interpretative to configurative practices, we find ourselves in a new relationship to media. Since configuration requires active awareness of systems and their structures of control, this turn allows us to resist the assertion of invisibility or transparency in communications systems – a danger that seems particularly pronounced in these new wars of the 24-hour news cycle. It may happen that in refusing the transparency of media we make ourselves better able to interrogate the nature of the conflict, perhaps even to understand more clearly what we mean when we talk about war and other deadly games. This is to cast the discussion in very broad terms, however, taking up large social concerns, including what in an age of writing came to be called literacy. That term may no longer apply without significant alteration, but it still seems true that a general understanding of media, the prevailing logic of production and reception in our modes of communication, is conditioned by local instances and practices. Or to put this in Lévy’s terms, the emergence of molecular society involves scalar similarities: what holds in large holds also in little. Thus even apparently parochial and academic controversies, such as those to which we now turn, may reflect a more significant process.</p>
<h2>Let the Games be Games</h2>
<p>There is a consensus for change growing among some of those concerned with creative work in digital media. This sentiment can be seen increasingly in interactive art pieces, conference papers, manifesti, web logs, and journals such as the newly launched <span class="journaltitle">Game Studies</span>. Like all so-called movements, the partisans of digital game theory or <span class="lightEmphasis">ludology</span> comprise a loose and fractious community, but most share at least one premise. We feel that narrative in certain conventional senses – mainly defined by the theater, the novel, and cinema – no longer animates the work we find most interesting as creators and/or critics. Some will insist we reached the turning point long ago, at a time when people such as Jay Bolter, Michael Joyce, George Landow, and myself were content with primarily literary models. More radical thinkers, such as Espen Aarseth, began to discard such approaches long ago, even before his landmark study of “cybertext.” However we date the change, though, we should be able to agree on what Aarseth would call the “ergodics” or pathwork of the moment: we have reached a fork in the road. Beyond this point the traditional narrative interest leads one way, while a second track diverges. We do not yet have a very good name for this other path, though we can associate some concepts with it: play, simulation, and more generally, game.</p>
<p>This parting does not spell the end of electronic literature. Poets, for whom narrative has perhaps always been more affordance than obsession, have turned very playful indeed where the digital interface is concerned, as the work of Talan Memmott ( <a class="outbound" href="http://memmott.org/talan/works.html">http://memmott.org/talan/works.html</a>), or Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson in PoemsThatGo (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.poemsthatgo.com">http://www.poemsthatgo.com</a>) attests. We will no doubt continue to see important projects that call themselves cybertext or hypermedia but retain a deep investment in words, along with a rich sense of symbolism and nuance. Some of these projects may even have major narrative elements, as in the <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> saga or Nick Montfort’s interactive fiction, <span class="booktitle">Winchester’s Nightmare</span>. Yet it seems clear that some people involved with digital media will be much more strongly drawn to ludic forms, from complex ecological simulations and virtual cosmogonies down to first-person shooting contests. For a few the shift may mark a strong departure from previous work and training. For others it may seem no choice at all, but the only logical response to contemporary media and culture.</p>
<p>In some cases this stance may entail a certain opposition. Markku Eskelinen notes elsewhere in this volume: “If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Yet as Eskelinen and others believe, many followers of digital culture do drop the theoretical ball, insisting that so-called interactive forms be engaged in a general project of storytelling. Among Eskelinen’s favorite opponents is Janet Murray, whose remarkable insights about digital art come mixed with an oddly antique strain of narrative theory that seems bound to annoy even lapsed poststructuralists. In Murray’s view, digital productions, from adventure games to multiuser environments, are all formally deficient because they refuse to sanction singular outcomes. While such texts may provide a type of closure, Murray considers this effect a counterfeit:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">…electronic closure occurs when a work’s structure, though not its plot, is understood. This closure involves a cognitive activity at one remove from the usual pleasures of hearing a story…. There is no emotional release or perception of fittingness, just a sense of going from the unknown to the known. This is very different from and far less pleasurable than our more traditional expectations of closure, as arising from the plot of the story and marking the end point of an action. (Murray 1997, 174)</p>
<p>The full extent of the debate between ludologists such as Eskelinen and neo-Aristotelians such as Murray has many dimensions, but few seem as definitive as the insistence on catharsis as the proper source of narrative pleasure. Murray’s position does seem debatable on theoretical grounds. Murray’s critics complain that she shows little interest in either the modernist agenda of formal experiment or the postmodern critique of literary ideology.</p>
<p>Indeed, any theory based on “hearing a story” seems notably backward after the deconstruction of language as presence. Yet, however controversial, Murray’s critical apostasy is really a side issue. In the final analysis the objections to Murray by Eskelinen and company are not theoretical but practical.</p>
<p>At least in the kind of narrative Murray champions, the reader’s primary “cognitive activity” consists of interpretation. Our ritual release of pity and fear arrives when we fully understand the relationships among characters and the pattern of causes that constitute a plot; or to expand beyond narrative terms, when we grasp the structure of metaphor and memory that informs a lyric, meditation, or confession. Our engagement with the text is driven by the desire to apprehend the structure in its entirety. As Eskelinen points out, we expect readers to study every word of a literary work, but Web surfers, Multi-User Domain dwellers, game players, and others involved with ergodic texts come under no such obligation. Indeed, game play often involves limiting engagement with the work, avoiding irrelevant or distracting details. One observer of digital culture, Steven Johnson, describes “information filtering” as a primary concern of all electronic discourse (1997, 32). Murray seems not to be interested in such strategies, however. Her notion of “electronic closure,” the moment at which the reader of an interactive text understands the rationale of its design and likely limits of its productive capacity, reasserts the regime of interpretation. As Murray sees it, configuration serves interpretation.</p>
<p>Yet the story of gaming may not be so simple even when games are mistaken for stories. Murray herself recognizes that those engaged with electronic texts sometimes fail to read for the plot; indeed, sometimes they cease to be readers and turn into players. <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span> begins with an account of Captain Janeway from the <span class="booktitle">Star Trek: Voyager</span> television series, who logs many hours in a simulation called Lucy Davenport, a concoction that resembles the novel <span class="booktitle">Jane Eyre</span> (a kind of <span class="booktitle">Jane Away</span> or <span class="booktitle">Eyre in Space</span>). Janeway’s character in the simulation serves as governess to the children of a Rochester-like figure, with all the familiar erotic tensions. Yet as Murray notes, Janeway seems less engaged with the cathartic “moral physics” of the plot than with tending to her simulated charges and maintaining the imaginary household. She subverts the closural design of the “holonovel” by sticking perversely to the middle of things, a behavior Murray finds more intriguing than problematic (Murray 1997, 16). This interesting subtlety surfaces at other points in her study as well. In a later section discussing the adventure game <span class="booktitle">Myst</span>, Murray makes a point I would later echo with respect to its sequel, <span class="booktitle">Riven</span>: namely, that the authorized, successful solutions to the game are less interesting than the more numerous losing outcomes (Murray 1997, 142). Murray argues that the game’s main charm lies in protracted exploration rather than end-directed questing, a practice I call misadventure (Moulthrop 1999).</p>
<p>These partial recognitions do not much impress the game theorists. From Eskelinen’s perspective, neither Murray nor I saw very far into the matter because we thought about games as distorted or perverse narratives, not as cultural forms in their own right. We therefore missed a crucial distinction. In games the primary cognitive activity is not interpretation but <span class="lightEmphasis">configuration</span>, the capacity to transform certain aspects of the virtual environment with potentially significant consequences for the system as a whole. As Eskelinen says, expanding upon Aarseth, “the dominant user function in literature, theater, and film is interpretative, but in games it is the configurative…. in art we might have to configure in order to be able to interpret, whereas in games we have to interpret in order to be able to configure, and proceed from the beginning to the winning or some other situation.” As will be apparent, the difference between “winning” and “other” situations requires further scrutiny; but for the moment it is sufficient to recognize that ludologists set aside narrative because they wish to focus on “configurative practice,” as Eskelinen calls it. This shift could be profoundly important for the future of digital culture.</p>
<h2>Go Configure</h2>
<p>In those classic Infocom games of the 1980s, unparsable commands would sometimes elicit something like this from the program: “I’m sorry, you have used the words <span class="lightEmphasis">profoundly important</span> in a way I don’t understand. Please try again.” As perhaps we should. The claims made here for digital game culture may seem at odds with the state of the art. In the popular mind and marketplace, the terms video game or computer game suggest products such as <span class="booktitle">Mortal Kombat</span>, <span class="booktitle">Tomb Raider</span>, <span class="booktitle">Half-Life</span>, <span class="booktitle">Evil Dead</span>, <span class="booktitle">Quake</span>, <span class="booktitle">Doom</span>, and <span class="booktitle">Unreal</span>. To be sure, the game business has also delivered better fare: the epic adventures of Infocom and Cyan, the attempts to reinvent game culture by Brenda Laurel’s <span class="booktitle">Purple Moon</span>, complex entertainments such as <span class="booktitle">Bad Day on the Midway</span> or <span class="booktitle">Grim Fandango</span>, and triumphs of simulation including <span class="booktitle">Black and White</span> and <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span>. By the same token, the best work in older media depends on vast quantities of disposable output which somehow never come to mind when we use the word <span class="lightEmphasis">literature</span>. We can have no serious drama like <span class="booktitle">Copenhagen</span> without a dozen recycled <span class="booktitle">Producers</span>, no <span class="booktitle">Summer of Sam</span> without a handful of <span class="booktitle">Lethal Weapons</span>, no short stack of Annie Proulx absent mounds of Jack Welch.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, a different standard seems to apply where play is involved. For complicated reasons, computer games seem more keenly exposed to cultural critique than most older forms. This has partly to do with every adult’s natural phobic response to teenagers, a complex that stems as much from memory and self-contempt as from fear of the other. It may also proceed from industrial culture’s deep distrust of configurative practices. Whatever the reason, many people, especially in the United States, find games at least vaguely antisocial. Noting their capacity to debase and desensitize, the mavens of morality particularly deplore violent games, and perhaps with some reason. As Simon Penny points out in this volume, specialists in military training believe that simulated killing quite literally makes the real thing easier.</p>
<p>Murray registers the need “to find substitutes for shooting off a gun that will offer the same immediacy of effect but allow for more complex and engaging story content” (Murray 1997, 147). Eskelinen and the ludologists may disclaim Murray’s concern for story, but it seems very hard these days to defend digital gunplay, even in overtly antiterrorist scenarios like <span class="booktitle">Counter-Strike</span>. Less militant offerings come under suspicion as well, for instance when we learn that earlier versions of Microsoft’s <span class="booktitle">Flight Simulator</span> could be used to reenact the attacks on the World Trade Center. Perhaps a proper study of play might lead to Murray’s pacifist alternative, but just as arguably any account of game culture must begin with what the market offers, including its worst celebrations of carnage. Thus the attempt to find social significance in games requires a certain intellectual courage – or at least that is one name for it.</p>
<p>What some call courage, others may consider opportunistic chutzpah; what is ludology if not a professional stratagem? Games of all sorts, not just those invented since the microprocessor, have yet to receive careful academic attention. Cinema has had its Eisenstein, de Lauretis, and Deleuze, literature its Derrida, Foucault, and Cixous, but with a few notable exceptions, the study of games as a cultural form has yet to begin. Games thus comprise an untheorized frontier whose blankness seems very attractive for those who would rather set than follow precedent. Ludologists often characterize the relationship of narrative and games in terms of colonization, casting narrative in the role of cultural empire; but such critiques may ricochet, for as western history demonstrates, rebellious colonies are sometimes empires in embryo.</p>
<p>For those of cynical disposition, the turn from narrative to gaming may seem just another power play in the modern academy’s Beirut-of-the-mind. This observation may appear crass, but practical matters often do. Much as we try to separate the work of theory from squabbles over cultural funding, faculty salaries, and tenure decisions, political realities must be acknowledged. Declaring the independence of digital game studies from narratology may mean seceding from literature departments, film studies programs, and perhaps even arts faculties. It could mean forging new alliances both inside and outside the academic community. If such speculations seem rash, consider that profits from computer games surpassed those of popular film before the turn of the century. As Espen Aarseth points out in his introduction to the <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> journal, game development is a billion-dollar industry with no clear research agenda (Aarseth 2001).</p>
<p>Cynicism has its uses, but also its limits. A billion-dollar industry is as much a cultural as an economic phenomenon. Or to put this another way, what seems merely a professorial turf war may in fact embody a more profound generational conflict. The turn from narrative forms such as plays, novels, and films to ludic forms such as games and simulations marks the emergence of a younger cohort who acquired their orientation to language as much from dynamic systems as from Aristotelian or even modernist genres. Those who find this group’s concerns childish, shallow, or improperly pleasurable may need to examine their premises lest they find themselves on the wrong side of O.B. Hardison’s “horizon of invisibility” (Hardison 1989, 5). Of this barrier Hardison notes: “Those who have passed through it cannot put their experience into familiar words and images because the languages they have inherited are inadequate to the new worlds they inhabit.” What we have here may indeed be a failure to communicate, with much to learn from the breakdown.</p>
<p>Turmoil in the academy often mirrors fundamental social shifts. Games are profitable because they are broadly popular, and this popularity does not depend entirely on simulated violence or other crude wish fulfillments. Just as there are more generic possibilities than first-person shooters, so there is more to game culture than simple aggression. Consider the case of the promotional game produced in the summer of 2001 to publicize Steven Spielberg’s <span class="booktitle">A.I.</span> (see <a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/aside">sidebar</a>). Consisting of an elaborate system of puzzles distributed over numerous web sites, the game was only tenuously connected to the content of Spielberg’s film, and while its main premise was narrative and interpretive (a murder mystery), its primary appeal was procedural. Players had to decipher obscure references and codes, in some cases involving messages buried in the infrastructure of web pages. Many participants in the game found it considerably more interesting than its cinematic pretext. As one put it: “The game is great. The movie is garbage” (Gallagher 2001).</p>
<p>While this development may seem highly salient, it should not be surprising. Games – computer games in particular – appeal because they are configurative, offering the chance to manipulate complex systems within continuous loops of intervention, observation, and response. Interest in such activities grows as more people exchange e-mail, surf the World Wide Web, post to newsgroups, build web logs, engage in chat and instant messaging, and trade media files through peer-to-peer networks. As in various sorts of gaming, these are all in some degree configurative practices, involving manipulation of dynamic systems that develop in unpredictable or emergent ways. More importantly, as Aarseth says, they may only be fully understood as active enterprises: in order to know what they are truly about, we must become involved in production or play (Aarseth 2001).</p>
<p>It might be absurd to suggest that all interactive media are species of game, but games do seem to offer a useful way of thinking about such media. Games model or inculcate a crucial set of cognitive practices. In the older cultures of print and broadcasting, the term literacy came to represent the fundamental capacity to process information – that is, primarily to interpret. It may be possible to expand the concept of literacy to cover digital systems, as in Nancy Kaplan’s argument for hypertextual “E-Literacies” (Kaplan 1995). On the other hand, the shift from interpretation to configuration may require something more than revision, perhaps even a fresh conceptual start, as in Greg Ulmer’s “electracy” (Memmott 2001). By looking at cyberspace through the lens of game play, scholars may find it easier to resolve this question, modifying or supplementing the old concept of literacy. Or as one particularly astute critic sums up: “The more we see life in terms of systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to represent it – and the less we can dismiss such organized rule systems as mere games.”</p>
<h2>Play Nicely</h2>
<p>The source of this quotation should give us pause. It comes not from Aarseth, Eskelinen, Jesper Juul, Marie-Laure Ryan, Gonzalo Frasca, or some other master of digital games. It was written by the eminent Aristotelian herself, Janet Murray (Murray 1997, 93).</p>
<p>This confluence of sentiments, if not of doctrine, suggests that ludology and narratology may not be absolutely antithetical. In some respects, Murray seems to value configurative practice quite highly. She defends aesthetics of the “multiform story” against critics who find such work simply incoherent (89); she points out that the computer is an “engine,” not a broadcast receiver (72) and holds that the key to future artwork lies in “procedural composition” (275); she argues that interactive design must find “formats” appropriate to digital technologies, rejecting those inherited from earlier media (64). In her work following <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span> Murray emphasizes the uniqueness of digital forms, insisting that “[w]e do not need designers who can produce more-attractive interfaces with the same formats of communications. We need designers who can re-think the processes of communication, exploiting the capacity of the digital environment to be more responsive to human needs” (Murray 1999, 4).</p>
<p>We might wonder how Murray can square these quite sophisticated views with an apparently naïve classicism. If we need new formats, why re-impose the traditional architectures of fiction and drama? If digital technologies take us so far from writing, print, and broadcasting, how can we resort to the ostensible simplicity of the <span class="booktitle">Poetics</span>? Eskelinen charges that Murray lacks interest in theoretical insights developed since the Second World War, but it would be unfair to accuse her of simple negligence. In fact Murray’s positions represent an American cybernetic pragmatism whose serious engagement with technological realities deserves a measure of respect, even if one takes issue with some of its implications.</p>
<p>Murray adopts her Aristotelianism at least in part from Brenda Laurel, a figure whose theoretical contributions are deeply informed by her experience as a commercial software developer (Laurel 2001). Murray herself designed groundbreaking simulations at MIT, pioneering educational multimedia. Her apparent lack of regard for contemporary theory may reflect a countervailing emphasis on practice which perhaps fulfills George Landow’s prediction that emerging media will provide an empirical testing ground for textual theories (Laurel 2001, 11). In other words, Murray’s approach to theory comes via application rather than contemplation – making her, in Aarseth’s terms, a legitimate player. She knows better than most that in the so-called new media it is not enough simply to describe or postulate differences: they must be produced in a marketplace of objects as well as ideas. She thus declares that the future of digital creativity depends on popular as well as elite efforts:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">…the shape of narrative art and entertainment in the next few decades will be determined by the interplay of these two forces, that is, the more nimble, independent experimenters, who are comfortable with hypertext, procedural thinking, and virtual environments, and the giant conglomerates of the entertainment industry, who have vast resources and an established connection to mass audiences. (Murray 1997, 252)</p>
<p>With a few modifications – say, striking “narrative” and substituting “cybertext” for “hypertext” – this forecast might pass among the ludologists without strong objection. Certainly their focus on popular entertainment suggests they might see themselves in Murray’s equation of forces, no doubt among the iconoclasts and pioneers. But while this analysis may narrow the division between games and narrative, the separation cannot be entirely erased. At least one salient issue remains. Although Murray and the game theorists might agree that the future depends on a contest of established and emergent interests, they probably do not see the same outcome for this struggle. Indeed they should not, if game studies have any critical value.</p>
<h2>Do Not Immerse</h2>
<p>Murray’s approach to new media seems both culturally and technically conservative; for some indeed this may be its main virtue. Like the design theorists she most admires, Laurel and her mentor Donald Norman, Murray assumes that new media should provide highly efficient, minimally obtrusive tools. She seems to agree with Norman that the best computer is an invisible computer, at least where narrative is concerned:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself. If digital art reaches the same level of expressiveness as these older media, we will no longer concern ourselves with how we are receiving the information. We will only think about what truth it has told us about our lives. (Murray 1997, 26)</p>
<p>Murray’s claims about “immersive” technologies seem accurate enough. Whether we are considering a fantasized holodeck or an actual computer game, interactive media tend to envelop the player in consistent rule systems, if not virtual realities. Indeed, this immersiveness or “holding power” is a major aspect of game experience, as Sherry Turkle pointed out long ago (Turkle, 64). Murray’s theory might thus be useful even to game studies, at least up to a point. However, it remains to be seen whether configurative media such as games will necessarily follow the same logic of disappearance that has governed print and film. Configuration after all differs fundamentally from interpretation. Although their behavior may be constrained by the arbitrary construct of a game, players are obliged to know the rules and repeatedly to consider a range of possible interventions, which leads to Murray’s controversial distinction between “electronic closure” and catharsis. Arguably the immersiveness of games differs crucially from that of narratives, and much may depend on this difference.</p>
<p>Reducing any medium to transparency confines it to a fixed and usually limited range of function. Consider an example from recent history. We have heard many times that the U.S. craze for citizen’s band (CB) radio died out at the end of the 1970s when users found nothing of importance to say on the air. This version of the story appears to confirm Murray’s assumptions about media. Ostensibly, people stopped taking an active part in their audio entertainment and went back simply to listening. After briefly dropping its cloak of invisibility, radio reverted to its transparent state, a commercial, one-to-many technology under stable corporate control. The CB fad thus apparently reconfirms the general rule that media are private properties, not civic services. Never mind that commercial radio began to switch to talk formats even as CB faded, squeezing some of the upstart’s crude popularity into more narrow and profitable channels. Disregard the very plausible connections from CB through Internet relay chat to instant messaging, where a popular form of communication has once again been devoured by oligopolies. Ignore the suggestion that private control of media may be an aberration, not the natural order of things. Transparent media may not bear much scrutiny, but happily for business elites, they do not present themselves for inspection.</p>
<p>If Murray’s process of disappearance is truly inevitable, it seems clear that the turbulent “interplay” of forces she posits must eventually subside into the steady state of mass markets dominated by a few major interests. An invisible computer is most likely a monopolist’s best friend – a dictum that seems as true at Sun Microsystems, home of the NetPC, as in any precinct of the Redmond campus. Molecular society emerges in a paradoxical moment, as great transformations always do. The irruption of popular empowerment coincides with the climax phase in the evolution of oligopolies, a final division of very great spoils.</p>
<p>One can address this double logic more or less dialectically, as does Jay Bolter in his theory of remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000), or one can learn from the story of Napster and other recent popular assaults on traditional profit centers that the major interests are less likely to seek compromise than continued dominance. The development of media in this century seems inevitably fraught with controversy, and as citizens of intensively informed societies we have great stakes in these oppositions, even when they appear to concern mere entertainment or play. Therefore if narrative forms play any role in the process by which “we lose consciousness of the medium,” there may be good reason to turn away from storytelling as the prime agenda of art.</p>
<p>This schism could have significant consequences. Eskelinen defines “configurative practice” rather narrowly as the player’s strategic operation upon the elements of a game, but it is possible to broaden this term significantly. If we conceive of configuration as a way of engaging not just immediate game elements, but also the game’s social and material conditions – and by extension, the conditions of other rule-systems such as work and citizenship – then it may be very important to insist upon the difference between play and interpretation, the better to resist immersion. Any analogue of literacy for interactive media would probably need to encompass such resistance.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen, though, whether game theory will help in this social and cognitive undertaking. As promised, we return to Eskelinen’s assertion that game players must “proceed from the beginning to the winning <span class="lightEmphasis">or some other</span> situation.” If digital game theory concerns itself primarily with choices that lead to winning situations – solutions circumscribed within a narrow calculus of outcomes – then it may be just as inimical as any narratology to a proper understanding of configurative practice. Limiting the definition of games to systems with simple distinctions between winning and losing could restrict this study to zero-sum antagonism, a domain that seems every bit as constrained and potentially obscuring as narrative. It might also lead the study of digital games into uncritical acceptance of existing genres. To be blunt, if we tie configuration inflexibly to some duelistic protocol, we might produce a game theory whose insights are limited by its gunsights.</p>
<p>In fact, Eskelinen complains at length about the limited conceptions of mass-market games, asking why they insist on simpleminded visual realism and leave so little room for strategic variation even within competitive contexts. He has proposed hypothetical games where players manipulate data gathered from external reality, or where game elements intrude into real space. In one of these scenarios, “[t]he Pokémons on the screen and in your living room… team up and steal your credit card numbers to order reinforcements” (Eskelinen 2001).</p>
<p>Although this last example is oppositional if not militant, Eskelinen’s probes seem generally to lead away from simple contests toward the sort of complex, open-ended play that is more often called simulation than game.</p>
<p>Improvisations and simulations seem even further removed from teleological narrative than agons, whose general principle might still be confused with cathartic closure. Moreover, the kind of configurative practice involved in these activities offers an excellent countermeasure against the transparency of media. Eskelinen’s hypothetical <span class="booktitle">Pokémon</span> uprising, for instance, nicely reverses Murray’s disappearing act. While the experience would no doubt teach some “truth about our lives,” that truth concerns the autonomy we grant to increasingly dynamic media. It might remind us that cyberspace is not a storybook or a moving picture but a complex virtual environment that should never be allowed to become second nature – or which, at any rate, ought never to be given free access to our charge accounts.</p>
<h2>Molecular Society and the State of War</h2>
<p>This chapter began, however, by alluding to a different sort of credit or credibility: our need for information and perspective in a continuing crisis, a theme to which we must now return. It is one thing to dream up mischievous invasions by surrealist software, but what can such fantasies tell us about a world where terribly real attacks have murdered thousands? The events of late 2001 have been variously described as the end of postmodernism, the death of irony, and a very bad time for comedians. No doubt they must also overshadow any attempt to speak seriously about games; however, that shadow need not become a total eclipse.</p>
<p>At this point we might want to think beyond games in their most literal sense, or rather to see them as elements of a larger process, Lévy’s transition from “molar” to “molecular” social orders. Molar technologies “manage objects in bulk, in the mass, blindly, and entropically” (Lévy, 40), whereas molecular technologies embody both a miniaturization of control (literally down to the molecular level in nanotechnology) and a devolution of that control throughout the human community. This pattern manifests itself as much in media and culture as it does in manufacturing or material technologies. Lévy notes:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Information technology is molecular because it does not simply reproduce and distribute messages… but enables us to create and modify them at will, provide them with a finely graduated capability of reaction through total control of their microstructure…. Thus digitization reestablishes sensibility within the context of somatic technologies while preserving the media’s power of recording and distribution. (Lévy, 48-49)</p>
<p>Lévy’s allusion to the “somatic” here is particularly important. The term means for him the embodied, the personal, that which requires particular human intervention or presence. Molecular media do not simply invite configurative practice, they require it. At their best they do not vanish into perfect transparency but present themselves as “a system-modeling medium,” to borrow Murray’s phrase, in which we must place configuration before interpretation. Increasingly, ordinary life requires us to apprehend these systems, to understand their rules and develop effective strategies for managing their effects and affordances. Thus, in their capacity to teach what Aarseth calls “ergodics” or multidimensional pathfinding, games represent an enormously powerful, perhaps a fundamental form of molecular culture. Games may be our surest route from the old world of “molar” literacy into electracy, ergodics, e-literacy, or whatever we finally call the new regime.</p>
<p>But how does this regime square with the latest new world order, with Mr. Bush’s “first war of the 21st century,” or as skeptics have it, the First Crusade? Since we have set aside Murray’s values of transparency and immersion, we can assume that molecular media will not lend themselves readily to any general mobilization. On the contrary, cultivating more conscious, active engagement with information systems implies at least the possibility of opposition. Indeed, as we have already suggested, the political economy of media in the 21st century seems to demand dissent and intervention. The declaration (or acclamation) of war may distract attention from preexisting conflicts inherent in information culture.</p>
<p>The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig explains that “[w]e can build, or architect, cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground” (Lessig 1999, 6). As Lessig sees it, a confluence of government and commercial interests must severely impede any movement toward Lévy’s molecular society unless a constituency develops to oppose them. This resistance must be active and deliberate. Lessig insists that “[t]here is no choice that does not include some kind of <span class="lightEmphasis">building</span>. Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us” (Lessig 1999, 6).</p>
<p>It is tempting to compare Lessig’s semi-utopian “us” to Lévy’s equally hypothetical notion of “the just,” the quiet minority of believers in human potential who embody “both the necessary condition of the universe and the superfluity that makes it worthwhile” (Lévy 1997, 39). To the extent that a culture of digital play increases the reach of this always dubious pronoun – producing more people who refuse to play the accepted storylines, or who know enough about the <span class="foreignWord">techne</span> of code to rewrite it – then it may set a limit on the power of purely interpretive media. Such may be the dream.</p>
<p>No limit once set, though, ever escapes testing. Writing back in the old century, before the present terror war boiled up, Lessig worries primarily about efforts to foreclose on the development of open-source software. Access to source code, he rightly notes, allows users to gain control of system architecture, the most powerful regulating factor in cyberspace. Indeed, the ability to intervene at that architectural level must be another key component of molecular, configurative culture. He might see it as the most serious practical opposition that can come from the ethos of games and simulations; but its status remains very much in doubt.</p>
<p>Unlike Lévy, Lessig is a most reluctant utopian. He points out that the communitarian ethic of the early Internet has been largely eroded by dot-com profiteering, even as government and press have systematically demonized autonomous code writers as outlaw “hackers” (Lessig 1999, 8). These observations are sobering. No doubt the struggle over open code will become a major battlefront when the full implications of the war on terrorism present themselves. As government defines its concept of extended, perhaps unlimited conflict, controversies seem sure to erupt over privacy of communications, access to effective encryption, freedom of association and speech. If terror attacks recur or escalate, decision makers may move toward more rigid, unconfigurable architectures – in effect locking down the terms of the national security state. Such developments would push back toward a more centrally managed, homogeneous, “molar” organization of media and society.</p>
<p>As one considers the possibilities for repression, the attraction of the old zero-sum game becomes strong, especially if one is among the majority of U.S. citizens who voted for someone other than George Bush in 2000. Yet if a configurative approach to media teaches anything, it is an appreciation of complex and multiple situations. As Thomas Pynchon noted, They-systems tend to breed We-systems; but to place absolute faith in either is to embrace delusion (Pynchon 1973, 638). The best kind of game culture must teach us when to jump outside the game. The contest of suits-versus-hackers, libertarian idealists against the military-infotainment state, is only part of a larger, and in Haraway’s words a “deadly” interplay.</p>
<p>As Lévy notes, the climax of automation renders unto machines the machinic and leaves to us the unavoidable work of human beings: “the production of the social bond” (Lévy 1997, 21). The current state of war – whatever anyone means by that term – results not from one but many ruptures of this bond. Emergence of Lévy’s molecular society is threatened just as desperately by international terror as it is by reactionary instincts of the new world order. Indeed, our culture’s very capacity for change, its headlong rush into new forms of experience, seems a major cause of our enemies’ resentment. These facts demand consideration no matter what sort of ballot one cast in recent elections. Production of a new, more just social bond goes far beyond the reinvention of media, or of literacy and its sequelae. We know that this task involves blood and anger as much as stories and games: all the more reason to be very, very serious about the subject of digital play.</p>
<h2>Sidebar</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/aside">Sidebar images</a></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/manovichian">John Cayley responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/biodervish">Diane Gromala responds</a></p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/cyberpragmatic">Stuart Moulthrop responds</a></p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Aarseth, Espen (1997). <span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature Baltimore</span>. Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>—. (2001). “Game Studies Year One.” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no.1 (2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html">http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html</a>.</p>
<p>Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin (2000). <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>Eskelinen, Markku (2001). “The Gaming Situation.” <span class="booktitle">Game Studies</span> 1, no.1 (2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen">http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen</a>.</p>
<p>Gallagher, David F. (2001). “Online Tie-In Outshines Film It Was Pushing, Fans Say.” <span class="booktitle">New York Times</span>, July 9, 2001, C1, C6.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna J. (1991). <span class="booktitle">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span>. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Hardison, O.B. (1989). <span class="booktitle">Disappearing through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century</span>. New York: Viking.</p>
<p>Johnson, Steven (1997). <span class="booktitle">Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate</span>. San Francisco: Harper Edge.</p>
<p>Kaplan, Nancy (1995). “E-Literacies: Politexts, Hypertexts, and Other Cultural Formations in the Late Age of Print.” <a class="outbound" href="http://iat.ubalt.edu/kaplan/lit/">http://iat.ubalt.edu/kaplan/lit/</a>.</p>
<p>Krugman, Paul (2001). “The Fear Economy.” <span class="booktitle">New York Times Magazine</span>, September 30, 2001, 38-41, 54-55, 84-85.</p>
<p>Landow, George P. (1992). <span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Theory and Technology</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.</p>
<p>Laurel, Brenda (2001). <span class="booktitle">Utopian Entrepreneur</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>Lessig, Lawrence (1999). <span class="booktitle">Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace</span>. New York: Basic Books.</p>
<p>Lévy, Pierre (1997). <span class="booktitle">Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace</span>. New York: Plenum.</p>
<p>Memmott, Talan (2001). “Toward Electracy: A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer.” <span class="booktitle">Beehive</span> 4, no.2 (June 2001). <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps34/app_a.html">http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps34/app_a.html</a></p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart (1999). “Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks.” <span class="booktitle">Style</span> 33, no.2 (1999): 184-203.</p>
<p>Murray, Janet (1997). <span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace</span>. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</p>
<p>—. (1999). “Interactive Design: a Profession in Search of Professional Education.” <span class="booktitle">The Chronicle of Higher Education</span> 45, no.33 (1999): 4-6.</p>
<p>Pynchon, Thomas (1973). <span class="booktitle">Gravity’s Rainbow</span>. New York: Viking.</p>
<p>Turkle, Sherry (1984). <span class="booktitle">The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit</span>. New York: Simon and Schuster.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/taylorist">taylorist</a>, <a href="/tags/taylorism">taylorism</a>, <a href="/tags/donna-haraway">donna haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/pierre-levy">pierre levy</a>, <a href="/tags/informatics">informatics</a>, <a href="/tags/game-studies">game studies</a>, <a href="/tags/jay-bolter">jay bolter</a>, <a href="/tags/george-landow">george landow</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/espen-aarseth">espen aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/ergodics">ergodics</a>, <a href="/tags/talan-memmott">talan memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/megan-sapnar">megan sapnar</a>, <a href="/tags/ingrid-ankerson">ingrid ankerson</a>, <a href="/tags/poemsthatgo">poemsthatgo</a>, <a href="/tags/myst">myst</a>, <a href="/tags/riven">riven</a>, <a href="/tags/nick-montfort">Nick Montfort</a>, <a href="/tags/winchesters-nightmare">winchester&#039;s nightmare</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator959 at http://electronicbookreview.com